This Week In Ideas Shared With Panopto — April 10, 2015

Today is Friday, and at grade schools around the world, that means one thing.

It’s show & tell day.

It’s easy to dismiss show & tell as simply a diversion for young children, or to recall only the time being spent trumpeting a cavalcade of vacation mementos, plastic superheroes, and loose bits of nature collected on the walk to school.

But while we may not realize it, show & tell stays with us.

Show & tell is how we first learn to share the things that make us excited. It’s how we first learn to present ideas and information, how we first experience the nervous rush that comes with convincing an audience to care about what we do.

As we grow older, we learn new strategies for sharing — written documents, graphic design, and a host of other techniques offer alternative means to trade information. But even with those tactics in hand, when we really want to get our message across, we always go back to that model we learned first on Fridays at show & tell.

Presentations engage because they offer something for everyone — visuals, text, sound, movement, and best of all, a real, human connection. Little wonder that when we really want to be sure our ideas are heard we take the stage, be that stage a conference keynote, a classroom session, or even just a quick five minutes in a weekly status meeting.

And little wonder too that as technology becomes able to support us, we’re beginning to record those presentations to make them available not only with the audience in front of us, but with any audience all over the earth. Today’s video platform technology enables just about any of us to record and share just about anything — with just the click of a button. Because after all — when information or ideas are important to you, you want to show and tell the world.

This week we saw more and more people taking advantage of the power of video to share ideas, send messages, and make a statement. And in the spirit of passing it on, these are just a few of the ideas shared this week with Panopto’s video presentation software.

Invention to Impact: Eyes on the Prize — How to Develop a Focused Commercialization Plan
The University of Arizona’s Tech Launch Arizona (TLA) program was created to help move inventions, technologies and intellectual property from the laboratory out into the marketplace. The program brings together the faculty and researchers of the UA with the business community to maximize the impact of research and innovation. Join TLA for this latest installment of its “Invention to Impact” workshop series, examining how research can be harnessed to create the greatest impact, and what the most effective ways are to bring it to the world.

The Futures of Women’s Soccer
Join the audience at Duke University for this symposium bringing together scholars, journalists, and former players to discuss the past and future of women’s soccer. Over a series of panel discussions, the group explores how history can help us understand the institutional barriers and models for development that have surrounded women’s participation in the game, and discuss what the best strategies are for cultivating full and equal participation. Panelists also dig into the role of sexism in the media and how it influences the coverage of women’s soccer. Finally, the group looks to the upcoming Women’s World Cup in Canada, and what we can expect from this tournament both on and off the pitch.

As Robert Gordon University’s Aberdeen Business School celebrates its 50th anniversary, it is holding a series of public debates around the challenges facing society over the next 50 years. In the first of the series, the contentious issue of sustainable energy security takes center stage. With finite oil and gas based energy sources set to increase in cost and contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions, there is little consensus around whether we should invest in renewables or reinvest in nuclear energy. Making the case of nuclear over renewables is Professor Alex Coram, Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Australia and Visiting Professor at Aberdeen Business School. Arguing for renewables rather than nuclear is Dr Alan Owen, Director of the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Practice at RGU.

The Final Four, Hemingway, and Carbon Credits: A Timberland Investment Case Study
Dr. Chris Zinkhan, CEO and cofounder of The Forestland Group, visits his alma mater Duke University to share a case study in recognizing the value of timberland as an investment and asset class. Dr Zinkhan’s presentation explores the history and value attached to 390,000 acres of timberland spread across the upper peninsula of Michigan.

Beyond Adequacy: Hydro-Electrics and Mayan Power in the Terminal Modern
Finally this week, hear from Diane Nelson, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University as she draws on close to 30 years of ethnographic work in Guatemala to address post-genocide efforts at repair in the context of extractive mega-projects (like hydro-electric dams). In her presentation she weaves contestations for human rights and territory with new Mayan rights struggles that draw on Mayan math (with its relations to space and time via calendrics and sacred areas), itself re-energized by the global fascination with 2012, to re-invigorate “Mayan sabiduria (savoir)” as a lodestone for political power. Drawing on glyph reading and archaeological connections to the past, as well as efforts to make Mayan people “count” via consultas or do-it-yourself referenda that say No to transnational companies, activists make the radical demand that Maya deserve to live “beyond adequacy,” to enjoy the promises of “modernity” without always being the ones to shoulder its burdens of loss and displacement.